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International Spanish Website - Should I use a .com or a latino country's TLD?

I am building out an international website in Spanish. Due to the nature of the site, I will not be making individual sites for each country. The site will be hosted in the US. I'm debating whether I should use a .com or use a .com.es or .es (for Spain) or even a .com.mx or .mx (for Mexico).

I plan on getting visitors from all Spanish-speaking countries (Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Chile, Puerto Rico, etc). I did some searches on Google for some of these countries with a proxy and I noticed that there were many results from other countries in the SERPs. For example, when I searched in Mexico, there were .com's, .com.mx's and .com.es's in the results.

My question is which TLD is the best for an international Spanish site? Will using a .es make me rank better in Spain but a little worse in Mexico and Argentina?

4 Responses

Personally I would go with a .com or other generic TLD, however this is more from a user experience perspective than anything else. I'd suggest that if you're targeting Spanish speakers internationally they'll all be equally likely to click through and transact with a .com - whereas a .es may affect click through and conversion rates in say Mexico.

By way of reassurance re generic TLD versus ccTLD, I've not personally seen any evidence to suggest that a .es will rank better in Spain than a .com - (i.e. I don't think that using a generic TLD like a .com will hamper your SEO efforts at all).

I would examine which countey has the biggest search volume and choose that domain (suppose that will be Spain) In this case you have primary targetting for that country, that does not stop the site from ranking elsewhere, as you already see in the SERPs. Just get enough links from other countries. If you choose .com you will miss the opportunity to add specific targeting to at least one of the taget countries.

According to this list, Mexico and Spain are about even when it comes to Internet population.

This is almost a long tail country situation where all of the smaller countries combined have more Internet traffic than the top one or two countries.

So the real question is, what ranks better in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, etc--a .com or a .es?

In terms of English countries, this would be like asking what ranks better in Australia and New Zealand--a .com or a .co.uk? I suspect that a .com would rank better but I'm wondering if anybody has any tests that show this.

I can't help you with any personal experience and I suppose nobody will be able to as I can't even examine a method to test this. If I were you I would just like you put every effort in planning my seo, finding the best tld. So its just sometimes worhs to listen to another opinion: I think nobody will have such isue tested and numerically graphed. So choose either domain and put every effort in gaining local links. Both domains will be able to rank everywhere, maybe one is a little bit better than the other, but tell me the method to test. You won't know. So just go ahead, purchase one -(I would choose es) and go ahead link building. Everybody saying something will be just guessing.

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